


And it is called Hope

by ivyspinners



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-14
Updated: 2011-07-14
Packaged: 2017-12-06 08:02:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/733361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyspinners/pseuds/ivyspinners
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What keeps Sakura from shattering into pieces, during the war. Because the manga is at its core about strength coming from others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And it is called Hope

**Author's Note:**

> Mild spoilers for the events of the _Hokage Summit_ arc.

In the depths of the war, Sakura dreams often, and those dreams are rarely pleasant. There is nothing but red: on the ground, on her hands. None of it is ever hers, though she often wishes it was.

It is worse when it is Kakashi's, Sai's, Yamato's. Ino's.

It is worse when it is Naruto's.

It is worse when it is Sasuke's.

Because she has long since stopped believing any of them are invulnerable, and their deaths scare her more than her own ever will.

If those were the only dreams she ever suffered through, she knows she would walk onto the battlefield one day, in the failing edges of the war, and never try to return. She would stand drenched in the pieces of hundreds of lives, and watch as hers collapsed into nothing. And sometimes, she is tempted to do so: when the hospital is full and Konoha's reserve of medics is empty, and she is up to her elbows with unknown fluid, just to see someone else carted in through the door. She is tempted to just let herself collapse and shatter there.

It is at those moments -- the depths of night, when darkness hides the skirmishes between the Alliance and their enemies -- that Sakura clings strongest to the dreams that she still has.

Sakura is a healer by calling. She catalogues the children she saves, locks them in a vault to remember when she's bone-weary from healing and nothing is going well. She catalogues the wounds stitched together under her fingers, to dive into, when ninja are collapsing on the battlefield, and falling to her fists.

"You must really hate him," one of her colleagues observes one day, when he sees the craters on the battleground, which Sasuke and his team only just avoided not-so-long ago. Sakura ignores him, and keeps healing.

Most of all, Sakura catalogues the dreams she still has: perhaps not her greatest ambition, but the one closest to her heart. Meeting Sasuke on the road one day, with Naruto by her side. (They no longer have the resources to search for him.) Dragging him back, one way or another.

Saving someone, in a time when so much is about killing.

Showing him that he is not defined by the actions of others.

It keeps her together, the little dreams of what she can bring out in him, because Sakura wants to save lives -- a fragile respite from the blood.

Maybe it's an idealised image, but the Sasuke in her thoughts is a wounded child in some ways, a murderer in others, so Sakura does not think so.

She wonders what he would think, knowing that dreams of being with him give her respite from the raging war.

It does not happen quite as she imagines.

She stumbles onto him on the battlefield, after he turned on Madara, and she only knows it's him because... because Sakura will always know it's him. He is gasping out his last few breaths, skin discoloured with poison; Sakura gives him just enough to keep breathing, before she goes after the rapidly disappearing figure that had been leaning over him.

"KABUTO!" It feels good to shout again.

The same colleague meets her while she is stumbling back to Sasuke's side, Kabuto's body lying at the bottom of one of her craters, and the antidote to the poison in her hands. The colleague, in the end, is the one to sever Kabuto's head from his body -- just in case.

He watches as Sakura administers the antidote, Sasuke's head resting on her lap. The way her fingers stroke Sasuke's cheek, and Sasuke, half-unconscious, turns into it all the same. He eyes the craters -- at least as many as there were when she fought Sasuke and his team.

"You must really love him," he says.

\- : -

**Well? Feedback, even ones like 'it was ok' or 'I didn't like it' greatly appreciated. ******  



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